


And Deaths Redone

by salienne



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Children of Earth Fix-It, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-19
Updated: 2009-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:11:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salienne/pseuds/salienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over a year after losing Ianto and Steven, Jack makes the ultimate decision: he brings them back. But when people begin dying in very familiar ways all across Cardiff, can Torchwood stop the slaughter without, once again, sacrificing the people Jack loves?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She is sitting behind the counter, holding the yellow mums and green shamrock blooms back as she slides in the final sunflower, a ring of golden petals reaching out to her cheerfully from a dark earthy core. The customers in her small shop, a young couple and an elderly woman with a bright red scarf over her head, speak in murmurs, their voices blending in with the traces of rock from the music shop next door. She looks up, wiping green-tinged fingertips on her thick blue apron, as the elderly woman approaches her with a Pretty in Pink bouquet.

“Pardon,” the woman creaks, “how much?”

“Twenty quid, dear,” she answers. “And just this week, for another five-”

“Mum?”

She jumps a little, turning right to see a little blond boy in a red jacket. She guesses he’s about ten years old, and the blue eyes are wide as he looks around, as if searching for something but with no idea what or why. He has gotten behind the counter somehow and she kneels down beside him, the floor firm but comfortable beneath her knees. “Sorry love, are you lost?”

The boy looks at her, confused and maybe a little frightened. “Where am I?”

“In my flower shop, darling,” she tells him. “Did you get separated from your mum and dad?”

The boy shakes his head, eyes scrunched tight, and for just a moment she feels so dizzy the nausea is like a lump at the base of her throat.

“My mum,” the boy whispers. “My mum said I-” He jumps away from her. “No, no I shouldn’t be here!”

She reaches out for him, fingers closing on air, and when she stands she is in a small red-tinged room humming with the grinding of machinery. She gasps and stumbles back—her thighs hit warm metal. She whirls around and sees four fire extinguisher-like canisters, tiny keypads atop them, and shakes her head hard.

It’s hot in here. Her skin tingles like tiny legs and spider bites. The walls are concrete and she feels like she’s trapped in a box, a monochrome box, and she gasps in acrid air tinged with dust and turns back to the door, metal with a small square window. There’s a man leaning against the glass with—no, it’s the boy, the little blond-haired boy, and he’s still wide-eyed and saying something she can’t hear. She reaches forward and the door is hot, the door is stove-hot, and she snatches her hand back with a hiss.

“I can’t-” She gasps. “I can’t hear-”

She reaches forward again and now she’s in another dark gray box, this one metal, and oh God it _hurts_ , _everything hurts_. It’s like her flesh has been flayed off or she’s soaking in acid and every part of her, her stomach her back her head her breasts her eyelids, _every part of her hurts_ and she screams, she _screams_ , she can’t feel her throat and her arms are trapped above her head, she can’t get them down, she can’t make it _go away_ and she _screams_.

She struggles. She struggles so hard, left, right, left, right, left—the metal squeaks beneath her and the pressure makes it worse, the cuffs on her hands, the table digging fire into her back because everything is burning, every surface _burning_ and oh God she has no skin, _she has no skin_.

Beside her is the boy, also fleshless, also on a table that squeaks as he thrashes, and he can’t hear her shouting for his own screams.

~-~-~-~-

 **3 Days Earlier, Captain Jack Harkness’s Personal Timeline**

A year and eight days exactly. Jack Harkness sat on the edge of his bed, surrounded by the soothing hum of the TARDIS, and he crumpled the photo in his hand. By the time it had settled in the dark, Jack was already out the door.

The hallway was dimly lit in a faint shade of green, nighttime aboard a ship unanchored by any ticking clock, and Jack strode down it so quickly the heels of his boots beat like a verdict against the stone floor. Coral-like supports marked his every turn in shades of brown and copper, doors and bizarre windows swirled past him, and as he took the steps through the wardrobe three at a time, shoving coats and scarves and trousers out of his way, he hoped to hell the TARDIS didn’t know what he was thinking. He hoped to hell it didn’t alert the Doctor.

Jack Harkness never prayed, there was no point to it, but he just about begged whatever greater powers there were up there that the Doctor was somehow asleep.

The console room was empty when he arrived, and the coiling inside him eased. Silently he stood there, staring at the mishmash of controls like a disjointed crown around the still glass column, silent now as they drifted through the Vortex. The heart of the TARDIS was in there, a spark of the very essence of time and space, of everything really, and Jack knew how to let it out.

Before he could stop himself, he rushed towards the console and ripped out a square of grating at its base. He remembered being here so many centuries ago, back when he and Rose and the Doctor would laugh about drinks or maybe nothing at all, and he remembered the Slitheen with its arm around Rose’s throat. He remembered the TARDIS shaking beneath them as the Rift screamed open, remembered staring helplessly as Rose’s windpipe was slowly crushed, and he remembered the console splitting apart and giving Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen another chance.

If he had a truck or they were already back in Cardiff then maybe, just maybe, he could get at it that way. But through the wires and thin metal sheets it was easier to attack from below, and clawing his way through the entrails of the ship, that was exactly what he was going to do.

The grating shuddered when Jack jumped into the hole beside the console. The edges of his coat still lay on the floor, now at chest-level, and he pulled them down so that he could feel the thick fabric tumbling against his legs. He bent down, examining the web of wiring and resistors and converters, scanning for the weak spots in the welding or the screws. He thought back to all the times he had seen the Doctor down here, upgrading or troubleshooting this or that component. He thought of all the times the Doctor had trusted him enough to help.

Jack pushed apart the wires first, careful not to sever any connections as he pushed his way forward through the cramped space to solid metal, warm and vibrating. “Hey,” he muttered, stroking the familiar material, and then he pressed a button on his Vortex Manipulator and lit the area with a sharp blue glow. He squinted as the light reflected back at him from the wall, dipping into dents and flashing along their edges. Tracing the uneven welding along the hump of the console, he searched for any missed spot. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, fingertips seeking out that crack, that indentation, that _anything_. Anything but the smooth cord of metal, sealing everything away from him, any hope that he could—

There.

To his right, almost as far as his arm could reach, Jack felt a tiny hole. It could have been nothing, just a chip in the metal, if he didn’t feel a slight pressure when he pressed against the spot. If the lights didn’t dim around him and the TARDIS didn’t shudder, letting out a tiny chime.

Shit.

He had a plasma knife in his pocket, something he picked up in a market on Delta 17 after the Doctor made him surrender his gun, and he switched it on. A thin rod slid out, its white sheen cutting through the darkness, and he twisted his body around, pressing his back tight against a pipe and several thick cables as he angled the knife carefully towards the hole. He had to be careful not to cut any of the components around him; he didn’t want to send the TARDIS crashing through the Vortex while he cut into the core of the ship.

Footsteps slapped against the floor.

Jack’s eyelids slipped down, just a blink, and in that temporary blackness he could picture the Doctor running at full-speed, coat billowing behind him as he charged forward in a desperate attempt to fix whatever was wrong with his ship.

Jack began cutting.

The TARDIS screeched. Not the cloister bell, not yet, not a bloody red glow but an alarm calling for the Doctor, telling him that it was in pain and in trouble, warning Jack away.

He moved the blade another centimeter downward.

“Jack? Jack! What’re you doing?”

The grating clattered. Hands on his hips and back, fingers scrabbling to get a hold and Jack jerked his shoulders, ripping himself and the coat away from the Doctor.

“Jack, stop. Jack, don’t do this!”

Jack’s hand paused, just for a moment. The Doctor knew now. The Doctor knew his friend was about to betray every rule, every whisper of common sense and even the trust between them. The Doctor knew, and Jack glanced back at familiar legs and braced himself for the hurt and the rage he would find when all this was done.

Damn it, this metal was tough. Jack didn’t know what it was, it looked like copper but just an inch had taken him nearly a minute. He held the hilt of the knife away from the surface, afraid to cut into the actual Vortex, afraid of what that would do the TARDIS, but he didn’t have a choice now. He pushed the knife against the barrier and pulled. His biceps burned, his neck ached, and still he pulled with everything he had in him. He wouldn’t stop until his muscles snapped or the Vortex surrendered itself, whichever came first.

The Doctor was grabbing him again, and shit he was strong. Jack felt himself skidding backwards through the cobweb of connections, the wiring working in his favor now as it gave him extra support and forced the Doctor to rein in his strength so he didn’t short out something vital.

“Jack, stop. Just stop! Just think about what you’re doing.” Beneath the desperation, Jack could hear it, the stubborn hope. That was why the Time Lord had yet to surrender those TARDIS connections and pull as hard as he could, that was why Jack only had to wriggle to stay in the crawl space. Because the Doctor still believed in him. The Doctor still believed in the man who had failed every single member of his team.

Jack lashed back with his foot, kicking the Doctor in the chest. The Doctor stumbled back and Jack didn’t know any more than that, he couldn’t hear the impact over the alarm, and he willed the knife to work faster. He couldn’t let himself stop.

“Jack, you’re a better man than this. Just put down whatever you’ve got and come out of there, please. Please. While they’re still time, just stop.”

Three inches down now. He pushed the blade right, gasping in air spiced with time.

“Jack, you’re better than this, you-

“That’s where you’re wrong!” The words stunned him. He didn’t remember thinking them, he’d told himself he wasn’t even listening to the Doctor—but suddenly he was twisted around, the knife half-forgotten, and he could see pinstriped legs and no coat.

The TARDIS wailed.

Slowly, the Doctor bent down until Jack could make out knees pressed against brown fabric, pale hands, the Doctor’s face. He looked like a scared parent trying to talk his child down from a ledge. “Jack, this won’t solve anything. You cannot bring them back this way.”

Jack’s vision blurred. It was the wrong thing to say and he whirled back, jamming the knife into the incision. “Watch me.”

The Doctor grabbed his coat again, and again Jack kicked. Once, twice, a third time, a fourth. He heard a yell and thought he felt something give beneath his heel. Sweat dripped down his nose and into his eyes as the glare of the blade seared itself into his retinas, into the metal. The Doctor should have had better defenses than this. An ionic shield, more sensitive alarms, traps, better welding, locks on the grating, hidden switches, an electric barrier. Skin that didn’t break apart from a measly plasma knife.

Jack thought of all the ways he could have suggested to protect this ship, every defense that even he would have trouble with, and then he shook his head until he was tangled only in the worry of how much longer it would take to get through.

And with the Doctor struggling and pleading behind him, he cut a window into the TARDIS’s soul.

~-~-~-~-

Jack Harkness was no longer alive. He wasn’t dead either, not really. He found himself somewhere in between or maybe beyond, caught in the hollows of time and decision. He floated enveloped—no, overcome by a golden void, his every cell thrumming with a song that spoke of every possible truth. The singing and the light hummed through him and past him like the Vortex hardly noticed him, though somehow Jack knew that was a lie. It was difficult to remember here, difficult to keep track of an arm or a breath or a name. The rhythm pounded through his head like a heartbeat, and he could hardly keep track of anything but the Vortex’s version of _now_.

The Vortex embraced him in a clash of everything he could ever learn and everything he would lose, and before it could spit him out he clung to two faces beneath the blinding light.

 _Steven_ , he whispered into the void. _Ianto_.

The song shifted, an extra rhythm lilting through him, and without ever hearing a word he knew what the Vortex was telling him. He knew, _This is not your place_.

His mind skidded against the pulse of the singing. _Ianto_ , he begged, an angular face and neatly cut hair, body so heavy and red-rimmed eyes as he died. _Steven_ , hair like the haloed light around him and he could still feel the boy in his arms when he was just a baby, could still see the blood as blank eyes stared at nothing at all. Part of him yearned to ask for more—Gray, Owen, Tosh, Suzie, their lives and their deaths tumbling through his consciousness like a handful of pebbles—but just as he feared being denied for asking too much, he feared the opposite more.

Jack Harkness had lost many people in his life, and he would lose many more, and if the TARDIS returned every life he could think of now, what was to stop him from asking every single time from now on?

A new rhythm, a baritone. _You were not created for this purpose_.

Anger crackled through him like red-hot needles, and Jack choked back a scream. Like a perfect snapshot he saw the first time drowned in sharp angles and golden light: firing a useless gun just to give the Doctor seconds longer, the burn of a Dalek laser and the numbness spreading through him until everything had become nothing.

For just a moment, everything was nothing.

And then he gasped back to life.

The dust that had once been Daleks, human corpses scattered like twigs. He saw it now, the TARDIS wheezing out of sight like it always did only this time without him in it, and then only a dirty floor remained—an empty control room and a weapon he was left to dismantle alone.

The waiting.

The centuries, and every time something stabbed him or shot him or choked him or electrocuted him or bit him or radiated him or just plain killed him. His arms chained in the best position to twist his muscles into coils of fire and all those droplets of blood on the floor of _Valiant_ because, for the Doctor, he remained behind. The Master’s leer, the Doctor crawling like wrinkled paper, and every question he never asked because the man who was the last of his kind already hurt too much. The hell of an almost-year and Jack spent it forgiving, because he could.

The golden light that had never really faded returned. The TARDIS sang, and nausea crawled up his throat with the baritone’s sudden bitterness. _You were not created for this purpose_.

Jack felt the light begin to fade. Gold became yellow like the sun diluted into lemonade, pounding became a tap, the tap a stutter, and his temples were throbbing with the alarm in a crawlspace so suffocating, wires so close, the metal so hot—

“You made me!”

He ripped the words from his mind and lungs, forcing himself to plead with a force that, for all he knew, was already aware of any argument he would make and didn’t care. But once more he was broiling in the golden song, if he closed his eyes he could drift with its rhythm, and he knew the Vortex was listening.

“You’re part of me,” he screamed. “Take responsibility for what you’ve done!”

The song continued unchanged, a strange silence that sent a pang through his chest. It felt familiar somehow, like it fit, even as he knew it could crush him just as easily as it brought him back again and again.

His head was spinning, and although buried in the singing was the knowledge of how all this would end, it was impossible to disentangle that event from all the ways it wouldn’t.

“I know there’s still Rose in you,” he said, “and she’d own up to this. You owe me. Everything I’ve done, Rose, TARDIS, whatever you are, you owe me!” He took a breath, or at least it felt like he did. “Bring me back the people I love. _Please_.”

 _Ianto_. He saw the man, he _felt_ him. _Steven_.

The song continued unchanged, as it had for millennia, as it would until the universe wilted into nothingness and even then. The stars would fade, people would hide away in orbs until their minds splintered and then their molecules and the planets and the vacuum in between, and still time would flow. He might be there then, he might not. And just for a moment Jack saw himself truly, one tiny everlasting thread in a thick tapestry of pieces atop pieces, and his breath hitched.

For the first time Jack allowed himself to consider the possibility that he would fail.

After everything he and those he cared about had endured, after giving up and betraying the one person who would have been there for centuries to come, he might still fail. And still his mind churned with every death that was someone else’s, every death that was his, and every death that would still come and tear every single thing apart.

Suddenly, the air felt cool. Chills rippled through him. Before him was the image of a scale as majestic as one carved from a cliff face, and he felt himself pulled towards one side and thrown down. Around him the song continued unchanged but the golden light fled, swirling towards the opposite end as the great device creaked.

Somehow understanding, he managed, “I don’t care, I’ll pay it! Bring them back.”

The scales disappeared. Time was a golden whirlpool around him.

~-~-~-~-

Jack gasped back to life on the floor beside the console. It felt as if a tiny sociopath had gone berserk inside his head with a mallet and, after getting bored with the mallet, switched to a chain saw. Sitting up very very slowly, he noted the TARDIS’s smooth flight and the Time Rotor’s silence. The grating beside the console had been put back in its proper place. The Doctor stood just a few meters to Jack’s right, arms crossed as he stared at a spot very far away.

Apparently noticing Jack’s revival, the Doctor straightened and shoved his hands into his pockets. Jack found none of the familiar joviality in the eyes of the Time Lord, no empathy or sadness or even disappointment. He found fury, pure fury, the gaze of a man who had killed billions and then simply walked away.

Swallowing back the coldness in his gut, Jack looked down at his knees.

“I had to do it,” he said.

No response.

“There was no other way.”

“There is _always_ another way,” the Doctor hissed, and Jack nearly flinched. Though quiet, the words seethed with a darkness Jack had only seen directed towards the Daleks, a darkness that would have scalded him if it could.

Jack stood, using the console as support. “Yeah, like what?” he demanded. “Like letting them stay dead?”

A slurry of vertigo and pain swirled through his skull, and Jack curled his hand into a fist against the metal. Raising his head hurt. Meeting the Doctor’s eyes hurt. But he had to make him understand.

“Doctor, you lost Rose to another universe. Ianto died _in my arms_. Martha left you. You lost Donna. I killed my _grandson_.” His voice breaking, Jack let himself fall back against the console. His buttocks rested along its edge.

The Doctor said, “I destroyed my planet, Jack, my entire world.” Jack heard the shuffle of Converse against the grating, getting closer now, and he did not look up. “My family, every single person I grew up with, everyone I loved—they were there. I made Gallifrey _burn_ and them with it and you think I didn’t want to fix it? You think the moment it happened I didn’t start tearing that console apart?”

A hand on his arm and Jack’s chin jerked up. The Doctor’s face was so close he could see every wrinkle beside eyes that cut into him like a spike, and the Doctor pulled back. He stepped away. “I stopped myself, Jack. I stopped myself because that’s not my power to have. That’s _no one’s_ power to have.”

“Yeah, well, you’re stronger than me.”

Less than an arm-length away, the Doctor stood staring at Jack like he wanted to hurl him out of the TARDIS. When the Doctor moved away without so much as punching him, Jack was not surprised, but his disappointment was an icy oil that settled somewhere at the apex of his neck. He turned away from the pacing Time Lord, and he stared at a spot on the floor.

“Earth, 2009,” Jack said. “I need to get back.

The Doctor stopped. “The TARDIS gave you what you wanted, didn’t it? It brought them back.”

Stiffly, Jack nodded, and he heard a rush of air. When he looked up, the Doctor was running a hand over his face. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have _the slightest conception_ -” The Doctor turned to the ceiling and took several deep breaths. “I have to check on the TARDIS. I’ll take you to Earth when I’ve finished.”

Again Jack nodded, and he pushed himself into a standing position. The pounding in his head had calmed to an oceanic pressure focused along his forehead and temples, and he was able to walk to the doorway to the rest of the ship without stumbling. He turned to the Doctor, still facing away. “Thank you,” Jack said.

The Doctor did not acknowledge the words. Jack left the room.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over a year after losing Ianto and Steven, Jack makes the ultimate decision: he brings them back. But when people begin dying in very familiar ways all across Cardiff, can Torchwood stop the slaughter without, once again, sacrificing the people Jack loves?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to the lovely hippiebanana132 for betaing!

On top of a grave, beside a headstone with his name on it, stood a little boy. It wasn’t a cold day, not exactly, but the rain pouring down from the blank white sky made him hug himself tight. He was shivering. And the shirt he was wearing—no, the suit, it was definitely a black suit—it wasn’t his. It felt weird, all scratchy and heavy and wet, and it smelled bad too, like the burger he had once forgotten about after it fell behind the kitchen counter. It made him feel sick.

He tore at the buttons and threw the jacket to the ground, and he was about to go after the shirt when he made himself stop.

It was cold, and he didn’t know how to find his coat.

Steven Carter didn’t know where he was.

He knew he was in a graveyard, it wasn’t hard to figure that part out. He recognized the slabs of rock with names and dates on them, all different shapes but standing up straight like soldiers. The grass, though squishy beneath his feet, was dark just like at the place where his grandma was buried, and the tall trees with their bushy green branches lay against the sky in the exact same way. He took a step towards the nearest one, glossy black shoes that also weren’t his sinking into the dirt.

He stopped.

To his right was a particularly tall gravestone, like a stretched out pyramid of steps, and he remembered climbing it months and months ago, before his mother scolded him and pulled him down. He turned his head further right and noticed a much shorter round one; it had always looked so sad in comparison. Back to his left was a stone about his height, rectangular but with a rounded top and curled up at the corners. The inscription was short and he could never remember it, but he knew the name etched in silver on the black rock: Lucia Moretti.

He was in the place where his grandma lay dead underground.

Again, Steven turned in place, arms wrapped firmly around himself even though it didn’t help. This wasn’t a happy place, he knew that, and he knew that every time his mother took him here he wanted to run away or play hide-and-seek with his grandma, and then he wanted to kick every one of these stones to the ground.

But his mum knew this place, she had come here with him and come here without him, and maybe that meant she could find him. Maybe they had come to visit Grandma and he’d been asleep, or he just hit his head or something, and then it had started raining and Mum had gone to the car, and he had run back or he was looking at something and Mum had kept walking, and maybe Mum was right up ahead and any second now she would realize he wasn’t with her and she’d come back. Steven smiled through the water dripping down his face, imagining the possibilities. He looked towards the bushes with the pink flowers—he remembered the pavement was down there—and he waited to see his mother’s face.

He stood there, shivering, and he waited.

His cheeks were getting hot now, and his face was wet and it wasn’t just from the rain.

He took a step towards the bushes.

Still, he couldn’t see her.

Steven began walking, and when there was still no trace, nothing but the rain and the wind and more trees and graves, he began running. That pathway was up there, his mother had to be up there too.

“Steven!”

Twisting round, Steven skidded through the wet grass and caught himself with his hands. He knew that voice.

“Steven!”

Walking towards him through cramped and uneven rows of stone markers was a tall man with broad shoulders, his long gray coat flapping about his legs. Even though Steven could not make out the face through the rain, he knew of only one person that wore a coat like that. “Uncle Jack?”

 

His uncle began jogging towards him. Grinning, feeling so light, Steven took a step towards him.

And then he remembered.

Steven’s world spun. “No, get away from me!” he shouted.

Steven turned, and he ran from Jack as fast as he could.

~-~-~-~-

Dozens of miles away, also beneath a white, pouring sky, Ianto Jones stood on top of a grave he did not recognize. Around him were shining headstones of marble and granite, flowers glistening atop nearly every resting place, and the grass beneath him was so bright he could have almost mistaken it for cheerful. Examining the orderly rows and the occasional stone borders around some of the graves, he thought he might be in the Christchurch Cemetery by Newport, but he couldn’t be certain; with his parents cremated, he had never found the need to wander much further than the plaques by the crematorium.

Rhiannon would not have kept his ashes any more than she kept their mother’s or their father’s. And even though the rain he blinked away was stinging his eyes, even though he could feel the hair sticking to his face and the stench of rot was making him nauseous, Ianto turned to the nearest tombstone and put his fingers to the side of his throat, checking for a pulse.

He remembered what happened to Owen, and he refused to be like that. He couldn’t.

Beneath his fingers something thumped, and Ianto didn’t realize just how worried he had been until his shoulders fell. He turned his head up towards the sky, rain pattering against his lips and teeth, and he breathed. He tasted the water.

When he finally brought his head down, he smelled it again: rotting meat with a healthy dose of formaldehyde. He glanced around, saw graves and distant trees, somewhere to his right a man walking towards him, just another visitor of the dead, and then the grave beneath him and the tombstone in front of him. He raised his arm to his nose and sniffed.

Ianto coughed. He nearly gagged. Perfect, that stench was coming from his suit.

Because there wasn’t exactly a shop or a tailor in the area, Ianto dropped his arms and simply allowed the rain to wash over him. He breathed with his mouth. Then he knelt down before the nearest tombstone, a new one made of black and gray marble, and he squinted to read the golden letters.

A man walking towards him. In the pouring rain, through a deserted cemetery.

Ianto jerked up. He turned.

Strolling towards him was a Caucasian man about six feet in height, lanky with brown hair. He wore a long tan trench coat, and even though he was the completely wrong shape and the coat was the wrong color, just for a moment, Ianto let himself imagine that it could be Jack.

Something clenched in Ianto’s chest and he put his hand over his eyes, attempting to make out more of the newcomer.

The approaching man waved. “Hello!” It was a cheerful voice just audible over the roar of the rainfall, and Ianto scoured his memory for where he had heard it before, and where he had seen that face. “You must be Ianto Jones,” the man continued. “Good name, Jones. Never met a Jones I didn’t like… although there was that time I got slapped by a Jones. That hurt. Still, nice woman, I think she warmed up to me in the end.”

The man stopped walking and talking on the grave directly beside his, and Ianto stared at him through the rain. “Right. Okay,” Ianto said. He examined the man, the hair that was desperately in need of a trim and that seemed to resist both gravity and the force of the water. The brown pinstriped suit. The man’s coat had dampened to a pale muddy color, and its large lapels and the way it brushed against the grass made it seem almost too big.

Ianto’s eyes widened. He stood straighter. “You’re the Doctor.”

The man who was not really a man but a Time Lord replied, “That’s me. How did-oh right, right. Twenty-seven planets, Daleks in the sky. You and Gwen Cooper were quite helpful.”

Some part of Ianto realized this was a compliment. The rest of him was too busy sorting through a jangle of white noise, of unanswered questions and all the details that just didn’t add up: how exactly had he ended up in this cemetery, what had happened to the children, where were Gwen and Jack, were Gwen and Jack hurt, how were David and Mica and Rhi, why the hell was he wearing a strange blue suit that reeked of soggy roadkill, why hadn’t the virus killed him, did Jack get away, why had the Doctor not shown up earlier, why was the Doctor here now?

These, and more he couldn’t even keep track of, and the dozens of thoughts and worries churned together until Ianto was convinced he was going to give himself a headache.

Quite casually, he asked, “So I take it you’re here to help us with the 4-5-6 then?”

The Doctor shook his head. “That threat’s passed.”

“Passed? How?” Ianto stared at the Doctor, scrutinizing every arch of the Doctor’s eyebrows, every quirk of the lips. But his face was a blank, a carefully constructed blank, and Ianto couldn’t even be sure if the melancholy he detected was merely an effect of the graveyard and the weather.

“How long have I been unconscious?” Ianto demanded. “And where are Gwen and Jack? Are they…” He couldn’t finish. He didn’t quite know what he wanted to ask.

Rocking back on his heels, the Doctor told him, “Oh they’re fine, perfectly fine. Miss Cooper should be having her baby any day now, I’d imagine.”

Ianto could no longer even feel the rain. “Gwen just found out,” Ianto said slowly. “She’s only three weeks along.”

“No, Ianto Jones,” the Doctor replied, and his voice was alarmingly gentle. “For her it’s been almost nine months.”

~-~-~-~-

Steven Carter ran.

He ran, and he ran, and he ran.

A puddle—he nearly slipped; tombstones crammed together like old cans and he tried jumping over them; this time he did trip—and he scrambled back to his feet and kept running.

Behind him, his uncle was catching up. “Steven! Steven, stop! Please!”

He kept wiping at his eyes but couldn’t get rid of the mud, he couldn’t get rid of the rain. His pants were loud in his ears. Gravestones and bushes and trees rumbled past him, the graves getting older, the stones grayer and more crooked, and after sprinting across the pathway he didn’t recognize where he was anymore. His feet squelched through weeds as he nearly fell again and again.

He heard a thump and a curse, and turning his head he saw Uncle Jack on the ground.

Steven’s foot skidded over a patch with no grass. His elbow rammed into a tree trunk—he gasped. His eyes burned. Fire throbbed through his forearm and he cradled it close, thinking, _funny bone_ , and, _damn it damn it shoot damn it_.

Before it had even occurred to him to get up and run again, Uncle Jack was at his side.

“You okay?”

Jack’s hand closed on his arm and Steven wrenched away. “Get off, get away!”

He scrambled up, stumbled back to the tree trunk. To his left were more trees and roots, to his right more markers and dead people, and his legs were tensed and shoulders pressed to the bark when Jack grabbed both his arms. “No, let go, let me go!”

Kneeling down in front of him, Jack kept hold. “Steven. Steven, look at me. Look at me!”

Steven tried wriggling, he tried kicking, he tried screaming and biting and over and over again he kicked—but still his uncle did not let go. “No!” he screamed, “No! Get off! Get off!”

He pushed, he struggled as hard as he could, but it was no use. His uncle was too strong.

“Steven, I’m not gonna hurt you, okay? Steven! Just-just calm down and let me help you.”

Steven kept fighting, but he could feel himself getting weaker; he was tired, and his throat burned from yelling. His throat was so dry. The bark was wet and hard against his back. The legs of his trousers were cold and drenched with mud. It felt hot beneath the shirt, but his skin was clammy and there was a sharp breeze and he shivered. For a very long time, he couldn’t stop.

All Steven wanted was his mum and a cup of hot tea with some biscuits and his nice warm bed, and maybe… Maybe his uncle would take him there.

He slumped.

“All right, good,” Jack murmured. The grip on Steven’s arms loosened. “Now how do you feel? Does anything hurt?”

Steven shook his head, and Jack nodded. “Good.”

The rain seemed to have lessened, and it took Steven a few seconds to remember that he was standing beneath a roof of leaves and branches. He could see his uncle much more clearly now, blue eyes harsh against a teary pink and lots of stubble, like the PE teacher who always smelled of cigarettes. The smell of old dirt and old burgers was stronger than ever now, though only when he started thinking about it, and he shook his shoulders just once before Uncle Jack’s hands tightened again.

Steven thought back to the last time he had seen that face, back when it looked so frightened, like a stranger’s. Everything was strange in that room—the machines, the computers, all the adults looking at him and his mum was _screaming_. He had never seen her like that, not even when that lorry hit their car, not ever.

And then there had been that noise, and he thought something hurt, he couldn’t quite remember but he was pretty sure something hurt.

Steven yanked his arms back. He cried out. He wanted to yell, he wanted to kick and bite and run away, but even as he tried and Jack grunted and held on, really Steven just wanted his uncle to make everything okay.

Allowing his legs to sag, just a little, he whispered, “Uncle Jack, what happened? I…”

Jack watched him, but he said nothing.

“I-last thing I remember, there was you and these soldiers and-and you made me stand in this room and-” He remembered a sound, he remembered a sound that tore through his ears, and he remembered his uncle not answering him, not once. “And Mum was yelling,” he said, “and-” A sob caught in his throat, and like the raindrops around him it was followed by another. Another. His body was shaking with them and his uncle pulled him to his chest, one hand on the back of his neck and the other on his back.

“I’m sorry,” Jack whispered. “I’m so so sorry.”

Steven pressed his face into his uncle’s shirt, and he let himself cry.

~-~-~-~-

The Doctor and Ianto Jones still stood on the grave whose headstone Ianto had not read, and the Doctor had some long thin gadget whirring a few centimeters above Ianto’s sternum.

“What you’re saying,” Ianto was saying, even though it seemed the Doctor was paying about as much attention to his words as to the rain cascading over them, “is impossible. I was just with Gwen in London and, unless gestational rates have changed dramatically in the last few hours or days, she was nowhere near the nine-month mark.”

“Mm-hmm.” Slowly, the Doctor moved the object across Ianto’s collarbones. He grabbed Ianto’s right arm and pulled it forward.

“And even if I-” The Doctor pulled Ianto’s arm closer. “Could you stop that please?”

Without looking up, the Doctor answered, “I need to assess your physical condition. Stand still.”

Ianto clenched his jaw and stood still. His neck was starting to ache from being angled just slightly downward, the best way to keep the rain out of his eyes. “Look, even if I’ve been out of it for-” The gadget was focused on his bicep now, and maybe it was just his imagination but Ianto was sure he could feel tingling beneath the sodden fabric sticking to his skin. At the very least, the high-pitched whirring was starting to give him violent impulses. The Doctor angled the limb higher and moved the gadget towards his armpit.

Ianto pulled his arm away and stepped back. “What is that… device?”

“Sonic screwdriver. Perfectly harmless.”

“We’re in the middle of a torrential downpour. Won’t that interfere with your readings somehow?”

“No. Should it?”

For a long moment Ianto simply looked at the Doctor, saying nothing. Rain continued to pour down, slapping against the ground and new tombstones as it blinded him again and again. His jacket hang like drapery, the shirt clung to his skin like wet tissue paper, and if any lingering remnants of the alien virus didn’t kill him, he was going to get deathly ill from whatever sickness standing here wet and freezing triggered. Ianto didn’t think they could get any more soaked without jumping into the Bay.

With a sigh, the Doctor put the device, the ‘sonic screwdriver,’ away. “Fine, we’ll continue this in the TARDIS. Honestly, humans and a little rain.” Sticking his hands in the pockets of his trousers, the Doctor began walking in the direction he had come from. The rain was like a translucent curtain, and with every step the Time Lord took, it seemed as if he slipped several dimensions away. Ianto hurried to catch up. “You know on Woman Wept, before it froze over, people would come from light years around just to witness the rainy season? Of course it was less of a season and more an artificially induced yearly occurrence, but blimey, the crowds. They’d bunk up ten to a room beneath these brilliant glass ceilings and the sky, it was-”

“Doctor.” To Ianto’s surprise, the Doctor actually stopped talking. He asked, “What happened to me? How did I lose nine months?”

“Eight technically. Miss Cooper was already three weeks pregnant when you-”

“Fine, eight months.” Ianto’s voice was flat. “How did I just forget eight months? And how did I end up here in this suit?”

The Doctor and Ianto kept walking, and glancing over, Ianto noticed the Time Lord was very purposefully not looking at him. “This is a conversation best suited for Jack, I think,” the Doctor said.

“Jack’s here?”

“We’re meeting him at the TARDIS.”

Wordlessly, Ianto faced forward again. His feet passed one another on the grass, he stepped right to avoid the rocky border of a stone-covered grave. Wooden crosses stood beside the next two headstones and one was bent slightly into his path.

He hardly noticed.

Without much if any effort, Ianto could all but feel the strength leaking from his limbs as the virus moved through him. Warm metal in his hand until he couldn’t keep his fingers curled anymore, and the gun slipping from his grasp. He couldn’t remember if it fell. The room spinning, and he couldn’t even gather the energy to look at Jack before he collapsed. Then Jack’s arms around him—he could barely feel them, he could hardly keep his eyes open as he clung to Jack’s voice and said the words he’d told himself he would never say, the words he’d told himself he didn’t need to say.

Jack would forget him, he had lain there and he had been so sure of that. There were so many things Ianto had never done, so many marks on the world that would just fade away like weathered rock, and even though Jack, an immortal, loved him, even though Ianto allowed himself the comfort of that belief, he knew it wouldn’t last. After so little time with him and so long afterward, how could Jack ever remember a plain old human man named Ianto Jones?

Between two headstones, one gray and chipped and the other black with a pot of flowers and gold lettering, Ianto stopped. His voice was steady as he said, “I’m not taking another step until you tell me what’s going on.”

The Doctor paused, several feet ahead of him, and Ianto crossed his arms. When he saw the Doctor’s eyes, so old and sad in such a youthful face, he raised his chin higher.

The Doctor asked, “Did you read that tombstone you were standing next to, Ianto?”

“No,” Ianto answered, and he could barely hear himself above the rain. “Should I have?”

“Perhaps you should now.”

~-~-~-~-

Steven’s face was hot and wet, and Uncle Jack’s shirtfront was too. Sniffling, hiccupping, breathing deep over and over, the boy wiped at his face. Still kneeling in front of him, Jack’s thumbs swiped across his cheekbones, and even though the rain drizzled down through the leaves, for just a few minutes Steven’s face remained dry.

“Steven,” Jack said, his voice trembling, “what happened to you will never happen again. _Never_. I promise you.”

Steven stared at him, at a man whom he had almost always only seen laughing and who had now very obviously been crying, the man who had been there when everything started to hurt.

He could run away again now, his uncle had let go of his arms and he could probably make a dash for it. But it was cold, and it was raining, and all around him were a bunch of dead things. His right elbow still hurt.

And in front of him was his Uncle Jack, the only thing here Steven knew.

At last Steven whispered, “I want Mum. Please, Uncle Jack. I just wanna see Mum.”

His uncle nodded slowly. Standing, he offered Steven his hand, and the boy took it.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s get you home.”

~-~-~-~-

No matter how many times Jack warned him, it seemed that even the grandson of an immortal had trouble believing that anything could truly be “bigger on the inside.” Steven stepped into the TARDIS, and Jack couldn’t help but grin as the boy froze, ran back out, and then ran back in again. “Oh this is brilliant!” Steven exclaimed, and, ignoring his pounding heart, Jack actually laughed as he walked in and shut the door behind them.

The first thing he saw was a dead man.

Ianto stood beside the jump seat in a dry unbuttoned black suit, pinstriped, hanging open to a red shirt with its top button undone. His hair was a damp mess, and his hands were on his hips. Somewhere nearby there was an arm attached to a man holding a stethoscope, but just for a moment, Jack hardly noticed. Just for a moment, Jack forgot about the Doctor and the Time Vortex and even his own grandson. He nearly forgot to breathe.

The man Jack had not seen since the moment the coffin shut stepped forward, pushing past the Doctor’s hand. His skin had color in it, a distinct pink tinge rather than a bloodless white. He could walk and he could move—his eyes, his eyebrows, the tiny muscles in his forehead and at the corners of his lips. His very alive, very pink lips were smiling, and as Jack’s fingers curled inward, he could practically feel the hair at the back of Ianto’s neck, right above the crisp red collar of that shirt.

Without even willing his legs to move, Jack found himself at the top of the entrance ramp. His mouth was dry, and Ianto was _alive_ and so close.

And then Steven was at his hip, Jack’s hand was on his shoulder, and he stopped. Still beside the console, Ianto did too.

Unnoticed between them, the Doctor was moving forward, and when Jack finally tore his eyes away from Ianto, the Time Lord was kneeling down in front of his grandson. Smiling wide, the Doctor said, “Hello there, you must be Steven. I’m the Doctor.” He held out his hand and, after glancing up at Jack, Steven shook it. The Doctor’s grin widened. “Hello.”

“I’m not five,” Steven answered.

Jack smirked, and the Doctor raised both eyebrows. “I gathered that.” The Doctor stood. “Come on, let’s get you into some dry clothes, shall we?” He ran a particularly calculating eye over Jack. “Both of you,” he added, and only now did the ex-Time Agent notice the weight of the coat hanging off his shoulders and the chill of the wet fabric cooling on his skin. Glancing at Steven, he saw the water shimmering across his face and hair and the white shirt and black trousers sticking to his skin, the water dripping from his hands onto the grating.

The Doctor was walking past Ianto now, towards the doorway on the other side of the console room. With a forced smile Jack said, “You sure you don’t just want me out of these?”

After both the Doctor and Ianto glanced very pointedly at Steven, Jack nudged the boy’s shoulder and nodded towards the entrance to the rest of the ship. “Come on, let’s follow the good Doctor,” he said.

Steven took a single step, then turned his head to look up at him with blue eyes that reminded Jack so strongly of the day he made them go blank that he had to look away. “He’s really a doctor?”

“Yup,” Jack answered, “best one around.”

Steven looked back at the skinny man in the brown suit. “He doesn’t look like a doctor.”

This time, Jack’s grin came more easily. “He doesn’t, does he?”

And then he remembered, and he turned his gaze to the supports because it was better than looking at the man he had betrayed, no matter how justified his actions now seemed.

“Come on,” the Doctor said, and he walked through the doorway. Gently, Jack pushed on his grandson’s shoulder, and Steven moved forward.

Ianto still stood beside the console, and as they passed him, Jack’s fingers twisted around his; Jack’s eyes slipped closed, savoring the feel of it, the nails and the creases and the skin that, though cold, still held muscles and bones that could press back. Somewhere, there was a sharp intake of breath.

So close now, close enough that he could make out every line on Ianto’s forehead, every dark spot in his irises, Jack allowed himself to look.

“Good to see you,” Jack murmured.

“You too,” Ianto replied.

Jack breathed, and Ianto and Steven did too.

And together, the two men and the boy who had once been dead followed the Doctor deeper into the ship that, for the love of a simple human being, had returned them all to life.


	3. And Deaths Redone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over a year after losing Ianto and Steven, Jack makes the ultimate decision: he brings them back. But when people begin dying in very familiar ways all across Cardiff, can Torchwood stop the slaughter without, once again, sacrificing the people Jack loves?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to the amazing [](http://hippiebanana132.livejournal.com/profile)[**hippiebanana132**](http://hippiebanana132.livejournal.com/) for betaing!

Showered, dressed, and very obviously irritated, Jack sat on the jump seat with his feet propped up on the console, fumbling with his wrist device. It was strange for Ianto, seeing him like that; not because it was particularly out of character, not because they were in a time machine of disproportionate proportions, and not even because Jack was seated beside the grandchild Ianto had never even heard about until—well, for him, until yesterday, when really months had passed. Rather, the sight was bizarre because of how utterly ordinary it seemed.

Jack, reclining, fiddling with his favorite bit of futuristic technology; and to think, just a few hours ago, Ianto Jones had been dead.

After what must have been yet another failed connection to Torchwood’s systems, Jack groaned and jumped to his feet. Ianto watched as he began pacing around the console, very purposefully pressing his finger on the appropriate buttons one at a time.

“Problem?” Ianto asked the second time Jack passed him.

“Yeah,” Jack answered, “this stupid thing won’t connect. I’ve run a full diagnostic, the transgalactic router’s functioning, and temporal scatter shouldn’t be a problem because we’re in the right time period. It’s like it’s just decided not to work. More stubborn than Casanova when he’d had a bit too much to drink.”

About two meters from where Ianto stood leaning against the railing, the Doctor removed the stethoscope from his ears and from atop Steven’s chest. “Oh, that’d be the TARDIS, electromagnetic temporal interference. When did you meet Casanova?”

“1747, Venice. You look a lot like him, actually.” Eyebrows scrunched together, Jack looked back down at the wrist device. “But cell phones work fine. Why would-”

“How did you get to 1747?”

Glancing over at the Doctor, Ianto noticed that he had removed his black-framed spectacles, something that made him look less knowledgeable but older and more imposing all at once. He seemed bewildered and, for some reason, a little angry. It wasn’t jealousy, Ianto could tell that much, and not for the first time he wondered what exactly the relationship between these two was.

“Time traveler,” Jack answered, the arm with the wrist strap raised. “It was before I met you.” And then he went back to staring at the device as if it were the universe’s most difficult Sudoku puzzle.

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head slightly. When he brought his chin up, his eyes fixed on Ianto’s and his eyebrows rose; Ianto looked away.

As Jack’s features finally relaxed, eyes widening and chin rising in what was obviously understanding, Ianto walked over. He had long since grown used to the tang of 51st century pheromones, but the scent still struck him like the lights of the cinema; even as it comforted him, somehow it made him feel unaccountably sad. “What is it?” he asked.

“The Manipulator and the TARDIS are both powered by spaciotemporal energy, like from the Time Vortex and the Rift,” Jack explained. “Similar energy patterns lead to interference and interference leads to a _useless_ wireless application. It’s like trying to pick up a Pivorian Drifter only to-”

“Anyway,” the Doctor cut in, and he removed the stethoscope from his neck and placed it in Steven’s ears. “Wanna hear something neat?” he asked the boy, once again kneeling down to eye level. “Try putting that over your chest, left side.”

“I know what my heart sounds like,” Steven answered, but nonetheless he followed the Doctor’s suggestion. When the boy smiled, Ianto couldn’t help but think about David and Mica. The Doctor had been brief when he asked about the Earth’s children, telling him that, as far as he knew, only one had been harmed. Glancing over at Jack, Ianto saw no sign of joy or guilt, nothing to indicate that Steven was that child or that he had also been brought back—but the conclusion was obvious.

The Doctor stood. “If you wire that into my systems,” he told Jack, “the TARDIS should be able to cut through any Torchwood firewalls and grant you access. Twenty-first century systems upgraded by future and alien technology—should take about, oh, three minutes?”

“No,” Jack answered. “We’d need to input the TARDIS base code into the Torchwood mainframe again, and with the Hub gone, we’re right back where we started.”

“Right. Oh, blimey, that makes things difficult.” Placing his hands in his pockets, the Doctor squinted, staring at some spot on the floor that Ianto was certain existed more in the Doctor’s head than anywhere on the actual grating. Again, Jack began pressing buttons, and as the Doctor approached with sonic screwdriver in hand, Ianto walked back to his spot at the railing.

Beside them, the console continued to sit in absolute stillness, although it felt alive somehow, like the metal was breathing. The proverbial elephant in the room, it seemed intent on keeping Jack from finding the new address for Steven’s mother.

“So,” Ianto said, “the TARDIS is preventing your signal from getting through.”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah,” Jack answered.

“Then couldn’t you just step outside?”

The synchronized way in which Jack and the Doctor’s heads shot up was more than a little comical. Somewhat uncomfortable with the dual scrutiny, Ianto smiled.

Continuing to stare at Ianto, the Doctor said, “That’s…” He glanced at Jack. “How did we not think of that? How did _I_ not think of that?”

“Don’t know. Maybe you’re getting old,” Jack replied.

“Oi! My mind is just fine, thanks. Brilliant, in fact. Now go and look up that address, preferably before we need a boat to get outside.”

Ignoring him, Jack said, “Good thinking, Ianto.”

Ianto acknowledged the comment with a small nod, and he watched as Jack walked over to Steven, now standing with stethoscope in hand. Kneeling down in front of his grandson, Jack put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Hey solider, I’m gonna go outside for just a few minutes, okay? Gotta look up your mum’s new address on this little gadget.”

“Mum moved?” Steven said. “Since when?”

Ianto noticed the way Jack’s back straightened, but he barely hesitated before replying, “She’s been thinking about it for a while, wanted to get you a bigger room.”

“But I like my room.”

Jack stood and brushed a hand over Steven’s head, then walked over to the exit ramp.

“Be quick,” the Doctor called.

“That’s never any fun,” Jack replied, and then he looked over at Ianto. “Ianto, come on. You’re technical support.”

“Technical support?” Ianto repeated.

“Yup.”

Knowing full well that the last thing Jack wanted right now was help with the wrist device he barely took off for sleep, Ianto began walking over. He wanted a moment alone with Jack too, away from the Doctor and impossible technology, away from the memory of waking on his own grave. The irony of now stepping out into another cemetery, ostensibly one containing the grandson’s empty grave, was not lost on him.

Steven reached Jack first. “Can I come too?”

For a moment, Jack simply stared at the boy. “Steven, it’s pouring out there. You’ll get drenched.”

“So? I like the rain.”

Again Jack seemed to contemplate him. He was frowning now, not exactly upset but certainly exasperated. “Besides, the Doctor’s not finished your exam yet.”

“Actually, finished about four minutes ago,” the Doctor said. “You, Steven, are strong as an ox, fit as a fiddle, and in perfect health too. Well, close as your average nine-year-old human male can get, anyway.” He turned to Jack. “Broke his leg about three years back. You know anything about that, Jack?”

“Should I?”

The Doctor did not respond. He kept his eyes on Jack, a steady gaze that, while Jack remained absolutely still, made Ianto square his shoulders. It was a challenge, he understood that, and Jack looked away first.

Smiling too widely, Jack put his hand on Steven’s shoulder and said, “All right. Come on, kiddo.”

Jack’s eyes slid up to meet Ianto’s, but Ianto did not move. There was something about seeing Jack there with his grandson, about knowing—or at least very strongly suspecting—that both he and the child had been dead and, thanks to Jack, were now back.

Suddenly the knowledge that there was another cemetery out there, and that it was almost certainly still raining, seemed threatening; and after everything that had just happened, after learning what Jack had done to those children and wondering what other secrets he didn’t know about, after standing beside Jack but losing everything immediately afterward, after saying goodbye just a few hours ago, after learning that Jack was somehow responsible for every breath he now took—after all that, it was too much to be alone with Jack and his grandson without anything else to keep him occupied, not laughing or filing or even just an angry Weevil.

“All things being equal,” Ianto said, “I think I’ll stay here. Soaking wet was never my color.”

Ianto saw what was no doubt a sexual quip forming on Jack’s lips, but after Jack seemingly remembered that his grandson stood right beside him, his mouth shut. Very simply he stated, “Your loss.” He put his hand on the door handle. “Doctor, try not to leave without us.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the Doctor replied.

Jack opened the door, revealing a wide slit of the outside world: cement and, beyond that, dreary wet grass and headstones. Clouds shadowed the already gloomy sight, and the absence of a single living person seemed appropriate. A cool breeze ruffled through Jack’s hair and Steven’s too, and even though Ianto stood a good distance away, he felt it brush his face. Apparently it had stopped raining.

“Children first,” Jack said, and he moved aside to let Steven pass him. Then, after a brief glance at Ianto, Jack was gone, and just for a moment Ianto felt himself engulfed by the whirring of the TARDIS. He let his mind drift until there was only that rhythm, and for that one glorious moment, he was thinking of nothing at all.

Then he turned to the Doctor, hard grating beneath his feet, green-tinged lights painting the copper around him, and said, “So, Doctor, tell me, how exactly does this time ship of yours work?”

~-~-~-~-

Alice Carter, once known as Alice Sangster but always always Alice ever since she learned to use the telephone and, after sneaking away from her babysitter, called Jack, now lived as Melissa Carter in a small blue house in Haywards Heath. It was smaller than the last house, now only one story high though on a larger property. The wood had recently been repainted, and the front yard shone bright green with neatly mowed grass and bushes trimmed into neatly curved blocks. Jack and Steven were silent as they walked up its front pathway, each step dictated by a smooth gray circle of stone.

A nice country home, picturesque even, and Jack wondered what it had been like for Alice picking it out, knowing she didn’t need the extra space because Steven wouldn’t be there to fill it, knowing it would be so easy now to keep bikes and basketballs off the front. It surprised him a little, that she still cared enough to create such a perfect image, but then that was Alice; she had always been good at appearances.

Upon reaching the front door, Jack paused, staring at the peephole and forcing his breathing to remain steady. He put a hand on Steven’s shoulder, pressed the doorbell, and waited.

Jack heard the footsteps first, the stepwise creaking of wood that very suddenly stopped. There was a pause, just long enough for a car with a broken muffler to drive by the street. Just long enough for Alice to decide if she wanted to greet her father now, or get a knife first, or simply walk away.

When the door swung open, Jack found that every one of his planned greetings had deserted him, crackled away like paper on embers. The same face, the same hair, the same manner, Alice was just as beautiful as he remembered—even if every gesture had been condensed into stillness, every twitch a blow held back. She stared at him coldly, and Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if she had taken out a gun and shot him, calmly, then and there.

“Leave,” Alice ordered, her voice trembling with a rage Jack had not heard even from the Doctor. She stood with a hand on the doorframe, another on the door, ready to shut him away at any moment. “Get off my porch right-”

Jack saw her gaze flick down to Steven. She froze and her eyes flew open, and she stumbled back with a hand pressed to her lips. “Oh God.”

“Mum?” Steven’s shoulder tensed beneath Jack’s hand, and Jack tightened his grip to keep the boy from moving forward.

“Oh my God,” Alice breathed again, and though she glanced at Jack, her gaze was anchored on her child, on the son that her father had killed. She had held the body in her arms, Steven’s blood had stained her shirt and chest and still she held on until his body emptied, until strange arms pulled her away from her son when he was still warm and pliant and blue eyes stared out from deep within the skin—and the whole time she wept and screamed, and Jack made himself watch.

“Steven?” Alice managed.

“Mum, it’s me.” Steven stepped forward, and Jack’s hand slipped away.

Alice took another step back.

Her gaze switched to Jack, and though the eyes glistened, though her chest heaved from sorrow or panic or a myriad of other emotions Jack knew he was the cause of, the immortal still felt impaled by those familiar brown eyes. “What did you do?” Alice demanded. “ _What did you do_?”

“It’s him, Alice. It really is,” Jack answered. “It’s your son, it’s Steven.”

More tentative this time, the boy took another step forward. “Mum?”

Steven was in the doorway now, and Alice was at the far end of the entrance alcove. Her heels hit the edge and she stood there, hands shaking, tears leaking down her face as she stared. “Oh God,” she murmured. “Oh God oh God oh Christ oh God.” A single sob and she moved forward, her hand outstretched. “Steven?”

Steven ran to Alice now, away from the man he thought was his uncle. He plunged into his mother’s arms so hard she nearly fell.

They curled together there, right inside the doorway as Jack stood on the steps. Jack saw how tightly Alice clung to her son, a hand in his hair and the other angled up his back as if he were still a newborn, as if just holding him close like this could sear him to her as she kissed him again and again. She pushed him back slightly, staring at his face and running her hand along his cheek, eyes and fingers smoothing over every feature. And with another sob she pulled him close and let his small arms close around her, her Steven, her son.

Mother and child and Jack watched the sight blur, clear, and blur again. He had saved him, he had done this, but he knew that he didn’t deserve to feel happy or proud for so many reasons it was impossible to count them all.

“Steven oh God oh my baby, my boy…”

Jack didn’t deserve anything that close to peace, but that didn’t stop some part of him from feeling it, and it didn’t stop him from aching to reach out and join his family just this once.

He swiped at his face. He needed to leave.

Her chin on Steven’s shoulder, Alice looked up at him, and the tears across her cheeks were like armor. “What did you do, Dad?”

Jack sighed. There was so much to explain, so much he should and shouldn’t tell her. “Could I come in?”

Alice stood slowly, her arm around Steven’s shoulders, and even the way her fingers curled on his upper arm seemed purposeful. “Tell me what happened now, or leave.”

“I found a way to bring him back, and I did. It’s him, Alice, it’s really him, right from the day he…” Jack took a long breath, eyes briefly closed. “He s just like he was.”

A single half-sob, half-laugh escaped her, and Alice pulled Steven so close he wriggled and complained. “And is he… I mean will he gr-” Her voice broke, and several seconds passed before she could continue. “Is he-”

“He’s just a little boy,” Jack said. “He’s not like me.”

“Oh thank God. So he’ll age, he’ll…”

“Yeah.”

“Mum, what d’you mean?” Steven asked. “What’s wrong with Uncle Jack?”

Alice rubbed his arm. “Nothing, sweetheart, it’s nothing.”

“Alice,” Jack said, “I am-”

“Thank you, Jack.” Her voice shook, but that didn’t change the coldness behind it, or the nearly businesslike manner in which she addressed him. “Now never come here again.”

The door shut, and for several long seconds Jack stood there without so much as turning his head. From inside the house he heard voices and the scuffling of shoes, footsteps that faded until there was nothing but the still air around him.

Jack Harkness turned, and again he paused. Ahead of him was the street, and he saw and he heard none of it. For him his daughter still stood in that doorway, just as she always had and in some ways always would, steel in her gaze and the fierce beauty of her mother; and she held the son he had taken away from her, now alive. One day Steven would die regardless, Alice long gone by then, and Jack knew that those corpses were all that he would ever again see of his family.

And though his daughter and grandson embraced just meters away from him, as Jack stood on the front steps of a nice house in a nice village of lunches and play dates and gardens, it didn’t seem much different from standing beneath the rain in a graveyard.

In truth, as Jack Harkness made his way back to the TARDIS, it wasn’t much different at all.

~-~-~-~-

Jack did not speak much, back in the TARDIS. A still figure near the doors with arms crossed and the greatcoat draped around him, he stood apart from the Doctor and apart from Ianto, and he glanced over only as necessary. At the console the Doctor examined the monitor, pressing symbols Jack had never been able to read, and Ianto stood beside the Time Lord, watching a process he would never fully understand.

“Right, Roath Dock, northeast edge,” the Doctor said, placing his hand on a nearby lever. “Gentleman and gentleman, hold on tight.”

The ride through time and space was just as much of a whirlwind as it had always been, and Jack found himself clinging to the railing as the Doctor leapt around the console and the TARDIS ricocheted through the Vortex. Ianto fell to the floor in a surprisingly dignified manner, his hands on either side of him as he landed square on his bum. Jack almost smiled as his shoes slipped and his right hip beat against the railing.

Almost.

Just a few hours ago, Jack would have been helping the Doctor steer this ship. He knew what the yellow button beside what was once a bicycle pump did, he knew how to adjust the blue and orange dials to stabilize their speed and about how far to spin the pale yellow wheel (though not the green, never the green) to set the decade. He knew which spots would respond well to a hit from the mallet the Doctor now held, and he knew which would cause the TARDIS to throw him across the room. He had once beaten the Doctor to the turboequalizer using his right foot.

But it was foolish missing something he had knowingly surrendered. Hell, he was shocked the Doctor was even helping them. Had he been in the Doctor’s position, Jack was fairly certain Ianto and Steven would still be standing on those graves and he would be trapped on some meteor-scarred moon, possibly forever.

When the TARDIS arrived, Jack was thrown onto the entrance ramp and the Doctor onto Ianto. Under other circumstances, Jack would have commented in a decidedly appropriate manner, grinning at the Doctor’s resulting eye-roll and Ianto’s quip. Now he simply stood and watched as the Doctor pushed himself off of the clearly aggravated human.

“Sorry about that, rough landing,” the Doctor said. He held out his arm and, after a brief hesitation, Ianto took it, pulling himself up.

“Hadn’t noticed,” Ianto replied. After straightening his suit, he rubbed at the back of his head and grimaced; Jack assumed it had smacked into the grating due to the Doctor’s none too graceful fall.

Pulling the monitor close, the Doctor announced, “Roath Dock, May the seventh, 2010. Six…” He squinted, moving his face closer to the monitor. “No, sorry, 8:39 in the evening.”

Massaging his now aching arm, Jack walked towards them. “The seventh? Wasn’t it just the sixth?”

“After what you just put the TARDIS though, we were lucky to make it to the right century, much less the right day.”

Examining the wires beyond the grating, it turned out, did nothing to ease the resultant silence pressing down on Jack like ocean water. The TARDIS’s humming was the unending current, swatting him sideways and backwards when really he just wanted to let himself break the surface or sink; controlling that force, even for an instant, even when he had begged and even when Steven was safe with his mother and Ianto stood here beside him, seemed wrong.

“Anyway,” the Doctor said, pulling Jack from thoughts of all those rigid glass-fragile rules he had learned at the Time Agency, “off you two go. Go out there and eat pizza and defend the Earth and whatever it is you two do, I really don’t need the details.” He waited for Jack to look at him. “Honestly, Jack, I really don’t.”

“You’re just afraid to know what you’ll be missing,” Jack countered, but even his smile felt false.

“Exactly. Spare my poor old Time Lord hearts the pain.”

The Doctor began pressing symbols on the monitor then, only to abruptly push the screen away and walk towards the jump seat, a counterclockwise path away from both him and Ianto as he fiddled with controls Jack was fairly certain did not require fiddling with. Ianto was now the closest he had been since they went walking to the wardrobe, and before he did anything else, Jack imagined that he could feel even the slightest of the younger man’s movements through the air brushing across his skin.

The Doctor was still moving away from them, apparently intent on ignoring their presence until they were both well and truly gone. Moving in the opposite direction, Jack stopped an arm’s length away, standing directly in the Time Lord’s path. He waited for the Doctor’s eyes to meet his before saying, softly, “Thank you.”

Something flashed across the Doctor’s face then, a pained sort of acceptance, and then it was that familiar blank expression staring at the console as his fingers danced across the controls. “Anything… happens, I should be here for the next few days. The TARDIS could do with a bit of refueling.”

Jack nodded, and with a look at Ianto that very clearly said, _Time to go_ , he walked to the doors. At the ramp he turned, and he was more than a little surprised to find Ianto beside the Doctor, his back to Jack.

“Sir,” Ianto said, “I’m not sure what happened here or how I’m back or even why, but whatever Jack did or didn’t do… A little boy is alive now who wasn’t before, and so am I. And no matter what else has occurred, I can’t exactly call those disappointing results.”

The silence was curious this time, not oppressive but tense. The Doctor was looking at Ianto with something like sadness, and there were so many things the Time Lord could do or say now, so many accusations or explanations or perhaps just the repetition of a sentence that still pinged through Jack’s consciousness now and again: _You’re wrong_. Maybe the Doctor would say nothing, maybe he would simply walk away and leave Ianto’s words like a child’s toys gathering dust in the attic. Maybe he would be right.

But instead the Doctor said, his voice surprisingly warm, “Good luck, Ianto Jones. A second chance at life, not many people get that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Oh don’t call me sir.” The Doctor winced. “It’s Doctor. Just the Doctor.”

Ianto extended his hand. “Thank you, Doctor.”

The Doctor shook Ianto’s hand, and when Ianto turned and joined Jack at the exit doors, the Doctor’s eyes met Jack’s. The Doctor nodded then, just slightly, and so did Jack.

And as Jack and Ianto stepped out into a bright Cardiff day, Jack allowed himself to tempt fate. He allowed himself to think that, just maybe, just this one lifetime, things were going to turn out all right.


	4. And Deaths Redone (4/?)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over a year after losing Ianto and Steven, Jack makes the ultimate decision: he brings them back. But when people begin dying in very familiar ways all across Cardiff, can Torchwood stop the slaughter without, once again, sacrificing the people Jack loves?

_**Fic: And Deaths Redone (4/?, Jack/Ianto, OC, R)**_  
 **Title:** And Deaths Redone (4/?)  
 **Author:** [](http://salienne.livejournal.com/profile)[**salienne**](http://salienne.livejournal.com/)  
 **Characters:** Jack/Ianto, OC; eventually the whole Torchwood crew and then some  
 **Spoiler Warning:** Through _Children of Earth_  
 **Rating:** R  
 **Summary:** Over a year after losing Ianto and Steven, Jack makes the ultimate decision: he brings them back. But when people begin dying in very familiar ways all across Cardiff, can Torchwood stop the slaughter without, once again, sacrificing the people Jack loves?  
 **Disclaimer:** _Torchwood_ belongs to the BBC and the associated writers, directors, actors, etc. I just like to borrow the toys now and again, but I give them back.  
 **A/N:** Any and all feedback is both appreciated and encouraged, and thank you very much for reading!

Gripping the slash-like burn on the back of his left arm, Ianto couldn’t help but feel a little resigned. First day back alive, and already he was getting shot at by lasers. Already he’d been hit, and though he would never admit it, the wound hurt. A lot. The self-cauterized gash burned and it was beginning to throb up into his neck, and while at least the pain assured him his heart was still beating, that didn’t change the fact that he had now gotten himself killed and injured all within the same twenty-four hour period.

The order of events somehow made it worse.

Currently, Ianto knelt—he refused to think of it as _cowered_ —behind the rusted husk of a car, peeking out as Jack desperately typed on a keypad set beside an ancient pair of double doors. It was harder to focus on the keypad than it should have been: perception filter, probably. Either that, or slightly more pressing concerns.

A spot beside him exploded. Dirt and rocks beat against Ianto’s back and head. He coughed into the dust-tinged air and slowly dropped the arm from his eyes, squinting and blinking rapidly until he was certain nothing vital had been damaged.

He could smell the dirt and singed fabric. He thought he could smell singed flesh.

Even though there was nothing obvious to shoot at, Ianto Jones ached for his gun.

Carefully, he looked back out across the pockmarked ground. The warehouse was large and old, seemingly abandoned. The slated wood of the walls was battered or missing in places, and while the building had probably once been tan, years of pollution, dirt, and peeling paint had turned it into an unfortunate palette of grays. Even the doors looked like they were about to fall off their hinges.

Since Cardiff wasn’t exactly brimming with smugglers or drifters who couldn’t find a better place to stay, the motivations behind such a high-firepower defense system were questionable.

Beside the doors Jack was still fiddling with the keypad, and as another silent shot hit the ground in a not-so-silent boom, Ianto was beginning to suspect that Jack had forgotten the code or that the system had broken down. Times like this, Ianto really missed Tosh. Even when Jack’s wrist device failed them, Toshiko had been able to work miracles and would then pretend to wonder why everyone was grinning at her.

Assuming she could have gotten to the keypad, that was. Assuming she wouldn’t have been shot dead in a completely anticlimactic manner, trying to win them entrance into one of Torchwood’s own facilities.

“Got it!”

The area was quiet, or at least quieter. Somewhere nearby was the rumbling of heavy machinery. Ianto’s own breathing sounded perversely loud in his ears.

Waiting for the next laser to fire, just in case, Ianto remained kneeling with his shoulder pressed to the car.

“Ianto, it’s clear! Come on!”

Slowly, Ianto stood. The concrete around him was riddled with gashes and rocks, and the air by his feet swirled with dirt. Somehow entirely unscathed, Jack stood by the doors, now ajar, waiting for him. Ianto let out a long breath, stretched out his arms, hid the resulting wince, and walked over. “That was not what I would call an inconspicuous security system, sir.”

“It must’ve picked up Vortex radiation on us, probably mistook it for Rift energy,” Jack explained. “It’s not supposed to say hello by shooting.”

Ianto couldn’t help but think that was very Torchwood, but said nothing. All the adrenaline after eight months of down time—he felt a little light-headed.

At the doors Ianto paused, waiting for his boss to lead the way. Jack had a thing for dramatic entrances, and this building was technically his domain.

Ianto turned to Jack expectantly, and then he frowned.

Jack was staring straight at him—specifically, at his arm. “Let me see that,” Jack said.

After attempting to get a look at the wound through two layers of ripped cloth, Jack tugged on the suit jacket and Ianto shrugged it off, draping it on his opposite forearm.

“Jack, it’s fine. I’ve had worse,” Ianto said. The laser had barely grazed him; it was probably only a second-degree burn.

But Jack’s attention remained fixed on the injury about three inches beneath Ianto’s shoulder, one hand gripping his elbow as the other parted the sliced fabric of the sleeve. Jack’s fingers were warm, but Ianto hissed in a breath as they pressed on the skin near the burn. Compared even to Owen, Jack didn’t have the most gentle of touches, and Ianto found himself thinking of the other Doctor, poking at him like at a science experiment; and really, Ianto didn’t want to be thinking about either of them at the moment.

Jack’s eyes met his then, so close that Ianto thought he could feel the other man’s breath on his face. His eyes flicked to Jack’s lips, and when he looked back up he wasn’t thinking of lasers or viruses or standing atop his own grave. Just for a moment, it wasn’t adrenaline squeezing at his heart.

Jack dropped his arm but did not move away. “We should put a dressing on that.”

“Don’t suppose there’s a chance of finding the supplies in there?” Ianto nodded towards the entrance.

“Probably not. Only medicinal technology stored here is a Chula nanogene generator, and trust me, those don’t usually work out too well.”

“People blow up?”

“No, but they do go around asking for their mothers.”

As unsure of the veracity of this story as he was of many of Jack’s tales, Ianto merely stepped back and allowed Jack to push open the doors. Jack motioned over his shoulder, and slipping the jacket back on with a wince, Ianto followed him in.

“Ianto Jones, welcome to Torchwood Cardiff’s warehouse of dangerous goods. Underground we’ve got alien tech that could destroy the planet, up here alien junk we couldn’t fit into the Vaults. And I think a pleasure sauna, though I never did get a chance to examine that properly.”

Jack turned around on the dusty gray floor, his grin oddly nervous. Around them was an immense storage space, lit by slivers of sunlight slipping in through cracks in the walls. While much of the floor was clear of anything but dirt and what Ianto suspected to be rat droppings, the rest was covered by dozens of wooden crates and tarp-covered objects, every one at least the size of an armchair and many double the height. Although the tang of wood permeated the room, the air itself wasn’t stale, probably due to the sheer size of the area.

“Why wasn’t this place mentioned in the records?” Ianto asked.

“I removed all traces, just in case.”

Ianto’s eyes drifted over the array of partially hidden alien technology, although for some reason he found it difficult to sift through his mental catalogue of Rift debris or even just to analyze simple shapes or dimensions. Instead he kept picturing spots of concrete exploding into powder, his arm throbbed, and his heart continued to beat hard in his chest.

Jack was walking again, now to Ianto’s right. “C’mon, there’s a spare SUV down here, we can drive down to the Bay and pick up some medical supplies. Dinner too.”

“We’ve got a spare SUV?” Ianto said, following Jack past a tall crate with a large blue X spray-painted on it.

“’Course we do. Not as high-tech as the other one, but it works in a pinch. What, you think you’re the first one to get it stolen?”

“I’m not sure if that works out in Torchwood’s favor, sir.”

Ianto sensed more than actually saw or heard Jack’s laugh.

For just under a minute, the two weaved around the jumble of alien objects in silence, making their way through about three quarters of the warehouse’s length. Ianto’s hands felt shaky, though a quick glance assured him they were quite still. He forced himself to take several long breaths through his nose, trying to ignore the dust and his growing sense of frustration.

He was fine, he had a second-degree burn at worst, there was no real danger, and he was _alive_ , which was more than could be said for most dead people. So if his body could stop acting like he was still the coffee boy cowering inside the tourist office while the rest of the team faced down alien threats, that would be really quite nice.

They reached the car, a near duplicate of their original SUV right down to the “Torchwood” engraved on the dusty black sides. It was in serious need of a wash, and probably some air freshener. Briefly Ianto wondered what had happened to the original and if they could still track it, and then he remembered eight months had passed; if the super secret high-tech Torchwood SUV had not been scrapped for parts yet, that was a greater miracle than his resurrection.

A fresh wave of pain, and Ianto managed not to cringe.

“Jack,” Ianto said, “the way this wound is healing, or, more accurately, isn’t… I take it I’m not like you now. I can still die.”

Jack’s voice was quiet. “Yeah.”

Ianto nodded slightly at that. He knew he should be asking _how_ and _why_ , or at the very least _how_ because that question was less dangerous—but right now he couldn’t. Bizarrely he found himself thinking of Lisa as she had been at Torchwood 1, but as if she had been here all along, as if she were still alive. What would she be doing now, if she had lost him and he had come back to her? Would she cry, or laugh, or scream, or just stare at him like a ghost? Would she run away?

And Rhiannon, God, Rhiannon. Ianto assumed someone had informed her of his death, if not Jack then Gwen, and this was one time he couldn’t avoid an explanation. It was too late for Retcon, not that he would have anyway, but there were still a number of cover stories available: undercover ops, a coma, or maybe just a bizarre alien virus that imitated all the physical effects of death. Owen would have had fun with that, and Tosh would have loved helping manufacture the evidence. And Jack, Jack who had once been a conman, he could probably think of a hundred convincing untruths, and none of them would stop the questions or the relief or the joy; maybe even the anger.

And then, one day soon, someone would visit Rhi and tell her that Ianto Jones had unfortunately died in the line of duty all over again.

Ianto needed to get out of here.

“Right, given that,” he said, “I think I’ll go to the chemist on my own. You know the layout of this place better than I do, and it would be best to check the rest of the defenses for any malfunctions.”

Jack’s forehead was pinched in uncharacteristic worry. In a voice that was far too soothing, he said, “It’s safe in here, Ianto. I programmed the defenses myself.”

Ianto raised both eyebrows. He placed his right hand, the one connected to the uninjured arm, in his pocket. His left he kept perfectly still.

“Okay, fair point,” Jack conceded. “I’ll do a full sweep of the area and make sure everything is in working order. You drive down to the Bay and make a visit to the chemist. While you’re there-”

“Actually,” and Ianto noted the surprise in Jack’s face, “I was thinking I would walk.”

Jack crossed his arms. “It’s a half-hour walk, Ianto. And you’re injured.”

“Eight months in a coffin, I could do with a bit of exercise.”

There was nothing much Jack could say in response, and Ianto was glad for that.

“I will need money, though,” Ianto continued. “I’m assuming my wallet wasn’t supernaturally revived for my benefit.”

Still, Jack said nothing. His arms remained crossed and he was looking at Ianto with a stern sort of expression, the type he used when trying to determine something while giving nothing away himself.

“Jack?”

Jack straightened and his arms dropped. “Yeah. Right.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a faded brown wallet—decidedly not Ianto’s, which had been black, thicker, and relatively new. He held it out and Ianto walked forward to take it. “Credit cards in there don’t expire. They should cover anything you need.”

Their fingers did not touch as Ianto took the wallet, and he put it in a trouser pocket without looking inside. “Good. Thanks.”

The silence between them stretched. Ianto took a step back and made to put his hands on his hips. That quickly changed to one hand. He glanced at the battered metal gate that could be raised to let the car through. Although the closest exit, it was farther from the shops and closer to the TARDIS than the double doors had been.

Ianto said, “I don’t suppose my flat is still…”

Jack shook his head. “Last I heard, your sister and Gwen, they, um, they went through everything and packed it away. Someone else is renting it now.”

Ianto nodded; his hopes might have been different, but he had expected nothing else. “I should be back in about two, three hours,” he said. “Is there anything I can get you while I’m out?”

“Just get yourself cleaned up.”

“Will do.”

After a quick appraisal of their surroundings, Ianto decided it would be best to leave the way they had come. The security system was disabled there, theoretically anyway, and he had a fair idea of the condition of roads and empty spaces in that direction. At any rate, it was somewhat familiar, and given the current circumstances, he was in the mood for some mindless familiarity.

There was more to be said to Jack, of course there was, but at the moment Ianto didn’t have the energy to figure out what that was.

Ianto walked back towards the crates and draped-over alien artifacts, stepping over what looked like a thin pipe peeking out from beneath one of the dark blue tarps.

“Ianto!”

Ianto turned, somehow both hopeful and terrified that Jack might ask to go with him or, worse, ask him to stay.

Something shifted in Jack’s expression then, though Ianto couldn’t pinpoint it. Loudly, Jack said, “Pick up some Chinese.”

Ianto stuck a hand in his pocket. His eyes swept briefly across the uneven edge of the tarp. “The usual?”

“Sounds perfect.”

Ianto couldn’t help but smile at Jack’s grin and tone, an obviously half-hearted attempt at flirting that was probably more for his benefit than Jack’s. “I’ll be back soon, Jack.”

Jack merely raised his chin at that, an indication that Ianto should get on with it already. Not one to disobey his Captain, Ianto moved through the labyrinth of unknown technology to the doors they had entered from, and he stepped out into the sunlight. He squinted. It wasn’t twilight yet, but in an hour or two it would be. The slight breeze felt refreshing against his face and neck, and even with the sun, it was cooler than inside the warehouse. Somewhere not too far away sat the TARDIS, out of sight but not exactly out of mind.

Ianto turned so that the Roath Basin was to his left, its still dark waters separated from him by dirt and concrete. Distantly he heard the shouting of men and then the sounds of construction: an engine rumbling, gravel hitting gravel, and a faint metallic screeching. Beneath the smell of diesel, Ianto could still detect the salt of a stale ocean, a reassuring scent even if reminiscent of rotten eggs.

Not quite home, then. Which was good, since whatever places home had been were gone now. Ianto began his walk towards the shops of the Bay.

~-~-~-~-

For a twenty-six year old whose teenage ambitions had amounted to _not Debenhams_ , Ianto Jones had seen a lot of death. His mother, when he was twelve. His father, just a few months after he’d dropped out of uni. His flatmate’s cat right after he’d moved in—that one had almost been funny.

Then there was Torchwood London, and the sheer devastation would have felt like a statistic had he not been there. Had screams not echoed over the comms. Had Mia not pointed a gun to his head just to keep him in the damn storage room, and then died after he begged her to put in the code to open the door.

Blood was splattered across the ceilings of the conversion rooms.

After the team shot Lisa, Ianto was never sure when to date her death: June 4, 2007, back in London, or September 27, 2007, in Cardiff. Both were permanent, in their way. Both stole something until Lisa was gone, and he was left. For fairness’s sake, he added Annie Miller, that poor pizza delivery girl, to his personal list of the deceased.

A car horn blared—a sedan, a silver Audi that had no business on this side of the nearby car park, screeched by. Actually stepping onto the grass to avoid the increasing traffic, Ianto thought of Tosh. He thought of Owen. He thought about how staggering back to his feet from the horrors or those losses was a dance he’d been practicing since preadolescence, since Rhiannon found their mother after the heart attack, but he got there before the paramedics and saw her on the couch, eyes half-open, the phone off the hook and lying on the floor. Then Rhi had been shouting at him to _get out_ and shoved him into the front yard.

They couldn’t afford a new place, and after six years Ianto learned to live with the echo of a woman he’d loved.

Ianto was used to death, used to dealing with it and, madly, used to its reversal. The Resurrection Gloves, Jack, Suzie, Owen; a tiny naïve part of him was half-expecting an intact Hub, Myfanwy screeching from its higher recesses. Given that Ianto didn’t even remember his actual death, only his eyes closing and then opening to a bunch of graves, this experience was probably closer to all the times he’d been knocked out—by Weevils, by cannibals, by angry aliens and plain old bad guys. Practically speaking, the lack of related injuries made this the friendliest loss of consciousness yet.

Cutting across the tip of the rounded grass divider beside a sharp curve in Pier Head Road, Ianto ran a hand over the back of his head and thought of Jack convulsing back to life. It hurt every time, Jack had mentioned that once; for him being dragged back from that darkness hurt like _hell_. It left a mark, which was more than any alien virus did, and Ianto knew he himself had never and almost certainly would never suffer through that experience.

But Jack—even after all that agony, Jack got up. Jack Harkness got to his feet, oftentimes he grinned that wide cocky grin of his, and he moved on.

~-~-~-~-

Once Ianto found himself in the more popular sections of the Bay, avoiding people long enough to think became more difficult. Those on strolls or seeking late dinners, laughter or clasped hands or children running from parents. As women with pocketbooks or men with bulging pockets walked past him, Ianto mentally rifled through Gwen’s bag of tricks and Jack’s additions. It wasn’t going to come to that, but it was always good to have a backup plan.

Passing by the precise wedges of grass behind the Millennium Center, Ianto felt his body tense. He glanced at parked cars and building tops. He even checked waistbands for firearms.

When he came in view of the Plass, he stared.

There was still a crater here, yes, blackened and deep. But around the wreckage of the Hub, around most of the Plass actually, was a chain-link fence with cement weights, and inside it was a construction site. Bright yellow vehicles sat heavy throughout the area, and scaffolds had been built around and within the crater itself. A pair of teenage girls stood at the fence, snapping picture with their cell phones, and most of the passersby hardly spared the wreckage a second glance.

Whatever they were building or rebuilding here, the entire affair was just so _public_ , and Ianto found himself attempting to catalogue all the extraterrestrial or anachronistic objects left around the main floor of the Hub. Then he moved on to estimating the spread of the explosion, the depth of the Vaults, and the strength of the relevant gates. The body parts they would have found had the explosion reached the morgue or cryogenic chambers. The weapons (or worse) a careless policeman or construction worker could have stumbled upon.

Someone would have dealt with this, he told himself, walking very purposefully forward. Eight months had passed, and Jack or Gwen or UNIT or even the Home Office would have taken care of the cleanup.

On the way to the chemist, Ianto stopped by the ATM and then bought a newspaper. Until he could access a computer, he would be collecting every one he could find.

~-~-~-~-

The sky outside was a pale indigo, the moon creeping into sight even as the stars remained stubbornly absent, when Ianto stepped back onto the street. Nearly an hour had passed but he had purchased the necessary supplies from the Co-Op Pharmacy; his wound was cleaned and wrapped. Even though he had only one arm usable for carrying, he had even stopped by Tesco. Now crowds were thinning, car parks emptying, and Ianto was perhaps a block away from prawn-fried rice, chicken with almonds, and egg rolls when he abruptly turned and walked back towards the Bay.

Although it was disturbingly close to the remains of the Hub, Ianto stood on the dock near the stairs to the Senedd, his feet at the edge of the wood. The wind beat at him with a patient ferocity, his suit jacket flapping and his eyes tearing, as a pink sky burned behind the buildings to his right. Amidst the small boats docked or floating within the Inner Harbor, the water shimmered with miniscule ripples glistening in the fading light. The ships bobbed in a soothing rhythm, kayaks and white motorboats lost to the trembling of the ocean, and beneath its surface the water was already black.

“’Scuse me.”

Ianto’s head snapped left. A few meters away stood a black woman a few years younger than himself, dressed in a white dress with a red flower print on it. She had a tan tote bag and held a DSLR camera—large and black, though not bulky—with the strap hanging around her neck. “Hi, sorry, um, this might be a really odd question, but would you mind if I took a few pictures of you? Your face doesn’t even have to be in them or anything, but you’ve got the silhouette I’m looking for and the spot and the lighting are _perfect_.”

It took Ianto a moment to respond. “You want to take a photo of me?”

“Yeah, if that’s all right.”

Ianto swept his eyes over her again, checking for a weapon or a wire.

Then he realized that he was suspecting a young woman taking pictures of the sunset of being an agent for a government that thought he was dead. And, really, there was being cautious and there was being one of those blokes who wandered the Bay in tinfoil hats.

“Actually,” Ianto said, “I’d rather you didn’t.” Miniscule or not, the danger existed, and besides, he wasn’t exactly a fan of being singled out in Polaroid form.

The woman’s shoulders fell, though her hands remained on the camera. “Oh, really? It’d be really quick, I promise. Just a shot of your back and that’ll be it.”

“Sorry, but no.”

After a moment, she nodded, then flashed him a thin smile and shrugged. “All right, your choice. I’m just gonna take some shots around you then.”

Hesitantly she stepped forward, then strode to a spot between the wooden posts several meters to his left. Ianto turned back to the harbor, trying to lose himself once more in the waters, in shimmering light and the embrace of the air.

The wind buffeted against him; it twisted his clothes out of shape and made his eyes water. The dock was solid beneath his feet, a bag of groceries and medical supplies leaning against his leg, and the Harbor was just water with some boats floating in it. Ianto’s fingers were cold and he put his hands in his pockets; he flexed left arm too much, and he winced.

There was still Chinese to order. Ianto sighed and lifted the paper bag with one arm.

“Hey, um.” It was the woman again. Her body was turned towards the water, the camera at chin-level, but she was looking at him with a distracted sort of hope. “Sorry to bother you again, but could you take a look at this? I can’t tell if the color’s quite right.”

“Photography’s not really my specialty.”

“Yeah, well, not mine either yet.” Her smile was quick, but genuine. “Please? I could really use a second pair of eyes on this.” Her gaze remained fixed on him, but Ianto recognized the way her face pulled towards the camera—the focus on her work, the urge to get it right.

Ianto walked over and she angled the camera towards him. The image was of the Harbor and buildings and a sunset like any other sunset, like he’d seen a hundred times. It was beautiful, yes, but not uniquely so. “It’s very nice,” he said.

“Thanks. But the colors, the way the pink fades and that orange-yellow glow… does that look washed out to you? Like, more than it should on a digital screen? I think I’ve set the exposure too high but I just bought this bloody thing so…” She took a breath, calming herself, and a little meekly continued, “I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet.”

Ianto looked back at the screen. He analyzed the tiny picture and compared it to the majestic scene beyond them. “The image does look muted,” he admitted, “though I’ve got it on good authority that there’s computer software to take care of that.”

The woman stared at him, her jaw and shoulders tense, and then she lowered the camera and sighed. She looked out across the Harbor. “Yeah, I suppose. Thanks.”

Unsure if the conversation was over exactly, Ianto continued standing beside the woman as she looked at the water, her hair blown back in the darkness, black strands brushing against the skin of her neck and shoulders. She lifted the camera again, the sharp blue glow making him squint as she adjusted something, and then the colors dimmed to those of the Bay. The image froze, but only for a moment; she brought the camera down.

Although it was likely he had simply missed the clicking of the shutter, Ianto doubted it.

“All this technology,” the woman muttered, so quietly he doubted the words were meant for him. “You start getting a handle on one thing and everyone else’s already twenty steps ahead.”

It was strange hearing a statement like that from someone younger even than him. Had he not recognized the longing in her tone, he probably would have found the words pathetically disingenuous.

The woman turned her head towards him and smiled. “I’m Tilly, by the way.”

The wind rushed through the silence between them.

“Ianto,” he said eventually.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

She nodded toward his arm. “That looks like it hurt.”

Ianto glanced down, once more recognizing the pain. He had forgotten. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “Nasty incident with a fence.”

Tilly’s jaw actually dropped. She turned to him fully. “What, you mean down at the Plass?”

“…Possibly.”

“Honestly?” she exclaimed. Leaning in, she urged, “Well go on then. What’d you find?”

“What did I find at the fence?”

“No, in the crater. I mean, people are always trying to get in there but I never thought I’d meet someone who actually made it.”

Ianto straightened, eyes widening before he could compose himself. “People are going in the crater?”

“Whenever they can sneak past the coppers, yeah. What, you thought you were the first?” For several seconds, Ianto just looked at her, straining to find something beyond an impatient excitement. “Oh come on, please? I swear I’m not gonna turn you in.”

“Just rocks,” he answered. “A lot of rocks and dirt. The sun was still up so I couldn’t stay for long.”

“Bollocks.” Leaning back, Tilly crossed her arms over her chest, the camera resting against her stomach. “Oh well, live in hope, right?”

She smiled, and he smiled back. “You’re interested in these sorts of thing then?” he asked.

“Well who isn’t nowadays?”

“Solicitors. Ann Widdecombe.”

Tilly laughed, shaking her head; as the hair blew across her face, Ianto found himself reminded of Lisa the first and only time he’d taken her to Wales. Not that Tilly and his late girlfriend seemed to share much beyond skin tone and the ability to laugh at his comments, but Ianto and Lisa had spent several evenings much like this, just standing by the water and chatting, watching the sun set.

A few times, he and Gwen ate dinner on the steps in front of the Senedd at twilight. Once, Jack came looking for him here and decided to stay. But sitting on the stairs with Indian food was different than him and Lisa walking alongside the water, standing side-by-side was different than Lisa’s hand in his; and Ianto couldn’t help missing something he let go of long ago.

“I don’t know,” Tilly was saying, “it’s just… There’s been weird stuff going on for years now, but I never believed any of it till I saw it with my own eyes. All those planets in the sky? Those Dalek things? Then what happened with the kids? My baby cousin was on one of those school buses. And now it just… it seems really stupid to pretend life is as simple as all this.” She spread her arms, gesturing to the air around them and beyond.

“I know what you mean,” Ianto replied quietly, and he did—but he was focused on her mention of those school buses. On his niece and nephew, who lived in those districts designated as the ‘lowest achieving ten percent.’ The Doctor had told him that only one child had been harmed, true, but seeing as the Time Lord had been absent during this particular crisis, how could Ianto trust that assurance as fact?

“So,” Ianto said, his voice not as casual as he would have liked, “have you heard any news recently? About the Plass or otherwise?”

“Yeah, everything,” she answered. “Probably some stuff I shouldn’t.” This smile was quick and shy, almost furtive. “I-”

Something chimed and Tilly jumped. “Oh bugger, sorry.”

The cell phone she removed from her tote bag was small and bright green; as she slid it open, Ianto failed to determine the make or model in the growing darkness. Brushing a strand of hair behind her ear, Tilly read something on the screen—probably a text message—and then snapped the phone closed. “Damn, I’m really sorry, I’ve gotta run. I was supposed to meet my boyfriend a half hour ago. I couldn’t miss the sunset though. Listen, um… I’m always looking for people to talk to about this sort of stuff, so if you want, I could give you my number? Send you some links and things?”

Ianto considered her offer for a moment, thinking of school buses and eight months he’d missed, sunsets and the weeks it would take to find all the information he needed for a coherent timeline of events. “That would be lovely, actually,” he said.

“Brilliant.” Tilly took a pen out of her bag. “Got any paper?”

“Will skin suffice?” he asked.

It took her a moment, but when he raised his right hand, Tilly laughed. She cocked her head, and after gingerly lifting his hand with her fingers, she pressed the tip of the pen to his skin. “I believe it will.”

The ink didn’t come at first, and it was slightly painful as she ran the pen over and over the back of his hand until parts of the skin turned bright red. “Sorry!” she murmured repeatedly.

In the end, though, the number was written successfully, and then the pen was gone and Tilly was walking backwards up the dock. “Send me a text,” she called, waving. Ianto waved back, and then she turned and walked quickly away.

Ianto looked across the water then, at the streaks of artificial light reflected along its surface, the sky an inky blue-black above. The horizon still glowed with a hint of color, though only if he looked for it, and even with the wind the scene seemed oddly still. He stood there for a short while, simply looking, and then he turned and made his way towards the shops. He had food to order, a cell phone to purchase, a text to send, and a warehouse to get back to. And hopefully by the time he returned, Jack would still be waiting.


End file.
